There Was Also Some Opposition To Social Security

When Congress debated the Social Security bill, in 1935, hysteria on the
right certainly ran high. The business lobby, echoed by its Republican
allies on Capitol Hill, charged Franklin Roosevelt with a plot to
extinguish liberty in America—to establish “socialistic control of life
and industry,” as the National Association of Manufacturers put it.
“Never in the history of the world,” declared Rep. John Taber, of New
York, after what one trusts was a thorough review of the history of the
world, “has any measure been … so insidiously designed as to prevent
business recovery [and] to enslave workers.” To another New York
congressman, James W. Wadsworth, Social Security represented “a power so
vast” that it threatened to “pull the pillars of the temple down upon
the heads of our descendants.” Still, its opponents in the House, and
later the Senate, buckled in the face of popular opinion, swallowed
their hatred of Roosevelt, and the Social Security Act passed by wide
margins.

Another wave of panic crested on the eve of the 1936 election—an
eleventh-hour attempt to seize on public anxiety about the Social
Security payroll tax, slated to take effect on January 1, 1937. The
Republican nominee, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, called the program
“unjust, unworkable, stupidly drafted and wastefully financed.” He and
his campaign raised the specter of mass fingerprinting, of Washington
snoops pawing through people’s “life records,” and of a bureaucratic
scheme to erase workers’ names and replace them with numbers. This
rhetoric reached its crescendo on Halloween, fittingly enough, when John
Hamilton, chairman of the Republican National Committee, stood before a
crowd of twenty thousand in Boston, clutching a stainless-steel
“specimen” tag stamped “Social Security Board”; Hamilton thrust it in
the air and insisted that if F.D.R. were reëlected, tags just like it
would be “hung around the necks of twenty-seven million” working men and
women. The Roosevelt Administration, he asserted, had already sought
bids for machines to manufacture the tags. (Hamilton refused to divulge
where he’d gotten the sample, but after the rally, he let reporters pass
it around and inspect it.)

RE: The worries of the business community have been largely validated. However, it's taken 80 years. Too many people reliant upon the government and increased cost for business, just as they predicted.--------------- The biggest offender at gubment trough IS the business community with their tax breaks and subsidies.